De Mattei: Pope Francis and the Eternal Destiny of Souls

Roberto de Mattei

Corrispondenza Romana

April 4, 2018

The purpose of
the Church is the glory of God and the salvation of souls. Salvation from what?
Eternal damnation, which is the destiny awaiting those who die in mortal sin. For
the salvation of men Our Lord offered His Redeeming Passion. Our Lady reminded
us of this at Fatima: the first secret, conveyed to the three little shepherds on
July 13th 1917, began with
the terrifying vision of a sea of hell-fires. If it hadn’t been for Our Lady’s
promise to take them to Heaven - writes Sister Lucy - the visionaries would have died of shock and
fright. Our Lady’s words are upsetting and severe: “You have seen Hell where
the souls of poor sinners go. To save them God wishes to establish in the world
devotion to My Immaculate Heart.” A year before, the Angel of Fatima had taught
the three little shepherds this prayer: “O my Jesus, forgive us our sins, save
us from the fires of hell, lead all souls into Heaven especially those in most
need of Thy mercy.”

Jesus speaks
repeatedly of “Gehenna” and the “unquenchable fire” (Mt. 5, 22; 13, 42; Mk. 9,
43-49) which is reserved for those who refuse to convert even at the end of
their lives. This first fire, the spiritual one, is the dispossession of God.
This is the most terrible punishment and what basically constitutes hell, since
death loosens the earthly ties of the soul, which yearns with all its strength
to reach God, but cannot do so, if it has freely chosen to separate itself from
Him through sin.The second
punishment is that mysterious one where the soul suffers not metaphorical, but
real fire, which is inextinguishably accompanied by the spiritual one of the
loss of God. Furthermore, since the soul is immortal, the due punishment of
mortal sin without repentance, lasts as long as the life of the soul lasts,
i.e., forever, for eternity. This doctrine is defined by the IV Lateran
Council, II and those of Lyons, Florence
and Trent. In the constitution Benedictus Deus of January 29th 1336,
Pope Benedict XII condemns the errors of his predecessor John XXII on the Beatific
Vision, affirming : «We define that according to the general disposition of
God, the souls of those who die in actual mortal sin go down into hell
immediately after death and there suffer the pain of hell » (Denz-H 1002).

On March 29th
2018, Holy Thursday, an interview given by Pope Francis to the daily La
Repubblica appeared in that newspaper. His usual interviewer, Eugenio Scalfari,
asks him:“You
have never spoken to me about the souls who died in sin and will go to hell to
suffer it for eternity. You have however spoken to me of good souls, admitted
to the contemplation of God. But what about
bad souls? Where are they punished?”

Pope Francis
responds thus: "They are not
punished, those who repent obtain the forgiveness of God and enter the rank of
souls who contemplate him, but those who do not repent and cannot therefore be
forgiven disappear. There is no hell, there is the disappearance of sinful
souls."

The way these
words sound, constitutes a heresy. The commotion [they caused] had already
started spreading [around the world] when the Vatican Press Office intervened
with a communiqué in which we read: Pope Francis “recently received the
founder of the newspaper La Repubblica in a private
meeting on the occasion of Easter, without, however, granting him an interview.
What is reported by the author in today’s article is the fruit of his
reconstruction, in which the precise words uttered by the Pope are not cited.
No quotations in the aforementioned article, then, should be considered as a
faithful transcription of the words of the Holy Father.”

It is not then about
an interview, but a private conversation which nonetheless the Pope knew well would
have been transformed into an interview, as this had happened in his four
previous meetings with Scalfari. And if - despite the controversies caused by
the previous interviews to the journalist from La Repubblica - the Pope
persists in considering him his favorite interlocutor, it means that the Pope through
these interviews intends to exercise a sort of Catholic Magisterium by way of
the mass-media, leading to inevitable consequences.

No sentence –
says the Holy See – has to be considered a faithful transcription, but no specific content of the interview is
denied; in this way we don’t know whether
or what aspect of the Bergoglian thought
is being misinterpreted. In the five
years of Francis’s pontificate, he has never once mentioned hell as eternal punishment for
the souls who die in sin. In order to
clarify his thought, the Pope or the Holy See ought
to confirm the doctrine of the Church publically, covering all the points of
the interview in which it was denied. This unfortunately has not happened and
we have been left with the impression that the news of La Repubblica is not
fake news, but a deliberate scheme, to increase confusion in the faithful.

The thesis in
which eternal life is reserved for the just while the wicked disappear, is an
ancient heresy, denying not only the existence of hell, but the immortally of
the soul defined as a truth of the Faith by the V LateranCouncil (Denz-H, n. 1440). This bizarre
opinion was espoused by the Socinians, the liberal Protestants, by some
Adventist sects and in Italy, by the Waldensian Pastor, Ugo Janni (1865-1938),
theorist of “Pan-Christianity” and Grand Master of the Mazzini Masonic Lodge in
Sanremo.

For these
authors, immortality is a privilege conceded by God only to the souls of the
just. The destiny of souls obstinate in sin is not eternal punishment, but the
total loss of being. This doctrine is also known as “optional immortality” or
“conditionalism” as it retains that immortality is conditioned by moral
conduct. The end of a virtuous life is the perpetuity of being; the end of a
guilty life is self-annihilation.

‘Conditionalism’
goes well with evolutionism since it sustains that immortality is the soul’s
conquest, in a sort of human ascent, similar to “natural selection”, which causes
inferior organisms to transform into superior organisms. We find ourselves
faced with an at least implicitly materialist idea, since the reason for the
immortality of the soul is its spirituality: that which is spiritual cannot
dissolve and those asserting the possibility of its decomposition impute a
material nature to the soul. A simple and spiritual substance like the soul could
not but be lost except for the intervention of God, but this is denied by the ‘conditionalists’,
as that would mean admitting the sanction of a just God who rewards and
punishes in time and eternity.

Their idea of a solely
merciful God instead, accredits the will of man with the faculty of
self-determination, by choosing to become a spark that loses itself in the divine
fire or be extinguished into absolute nothingness. Pantheism or nihilism are
the options left to man in this cosmology which has nothing whatever to do with
the Catholic Faith and common sense. Further, for an atheist, already convinced
that there is nothing after death, ‘conditionalism’ removes that possibility of
conversion which is given through Timor
Domini: the principle of Wisdom (Psalm 110, v.10 ) the Fear of the Lord, whose
Judgment no-one will escape. Only by believing in the infallible justice of God
will we be able to abandon ourselves to His immense mercy.

The preaching of
the final destination of souls which the Church encases in the Four Last Things
(Death, Judgment, Hell and Heaven) has never been more necessary than at the
present time. Our Lady Herself, wanted
to remind us of it at Fatima, foreseeing
the defection of Pastors, but also assuring us that we will never be bereft ofassistance from Heaven.